Abstract:
The second half of the fourth century and the first decade of the fifth saw a remarkable efflorescence of autobiographical writing. Although Augustine’s Confessions is by far the most famous example of this phenomenon, the period saw the emergence of other major works of narrative self-fashioning, including the first book of Hilary of Poitiers’ De Trinitate, the First Oration of Libanius, Jerome’s Epistle 22, the De vita sua of Gregory of Nazianzus and Paulinus of Nola’s Natalicium 13. Traditional explanations for this phenomenon have focussed on the content of these works, seeing the rise of autobiography as a reflection of a new, introspective kind of selfhood. This thesis argues that such explanations do not adequately account for the diversity of autobiographical texts in late antiquity, and impose modern presuppositions both on late-antique life-writing and on understandings of what it meant to be a human subject in this period. Making use of Paul Ricoeur’s notion of ‘narrative identity,’ this thesis considers the lifenarratives of late antiquity as literary products and situates them in relationship to a wider literary culture. Rather than examining them as evidence of new kinds of subjective experience, it considers the function and purpose of life-writing in the cultural world of late antiquity.